


Barnacled Warship

by paperclipbitch



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Angst, Community: hc_bingo, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Married Couple, Napoleonic Wars, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-12 04:14:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4465079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arabella's husband has returned from the war.  </p>
<p>Well, at least, someone’s husband has.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Barnacled Warship

**Author's Note:**

> [Title is a weirdly fitting Johnny Flynn song.] Written for my **hc_bingo** card for the prompt: _combat_.
> 
> Probably tilted slightly more toward the TV version than the book, just because the Arabella/Jonathan dynamic is more… IDK, _something_ , anyway. But works whichever medium you’ve consumed. I just _love them so muuuuch_. So I guess next time I’ll write something with less angst and more magic/bonking.

Jonathan was ever quick and flaming bright; aimless or sharp with new purpose, there was always a glow about him that made him impossible to ignore. Or perhaps it was that Arabella always wanted to look at him, never wanted to turn away, not even when he was young and scruffy and sheepish, scuffing his toes against the floor and mouth tangled when he wanted to speak to her.

He sits at the breakfast table and stares into his coffee cup and says nothing, the newspapers laid across the table. Arabella has read a headline or two, skipped her fingertips over some of the print, but she has taken none of it in, and Jonathan doesn’t seem to have noticed the papers at all. He used to hunt through their pages for news of Norrell, of himself, amusement and something more bitter combing through his features, but he’s listless, fingertips drawing shapes on the tablecloth. She wonders if he’s casting spells; if he’s watching something in his cup after all, something far enough away that she can’t catch it.

“Jonathan,” she says quietly, the name catching against her teeth. She’s said it so many times to so many people in the months when he was gone, reshaping the war, reshaping the continent, reshaping the world; to say it to his face, to his familiar stranger’s face, feels different somehow.

He looks up. For a minute he’s the gangly awkward boy she first fell for despite telling herself that she shouldn’t; eyes wide and guileless and so enchanted by seeing her that her breath stutters in her lungs. Then he blinks and the care and the world and the _magic_ settles back in, and he’s the grown man that she loves again, someone who has forgotten innocence yet reaches for it with his brittle fingertips. He smiles, sweet and vague, and takes a sip of his cold coffee. Arabella lets herself exhale, and reminds herself that this is better, and she is happy.

Her husband has returned from the war. 

Well, at least, _someone’s_ husband has.

Later, his palms shake against the silk of her dress, while she knots her fingers in his curls, pulling his head to her shoulder where she can press her cheek against his sunburned face and whisper _breathe_ while he laughs brokenly and tells her he isn’t a _child_ , it’s quite alright, and also that he isn’t sure that he remembers _how_ to.

Arabella kisses the corner of his eye, where there are new lines that weren’t there before he left, and he grasps fistfuls of her clothing. She remembers _that_ part from the heady first days of their marriage: the word _magician_ still teasing and delicious on her lips, caught up in bright new passion with the man she’d longed for forever, and the man who was blossoming into someone she didn’t know yet, but who would be undoubtedly _hers_. This is more like a cruel parody; Jonathan trembling and dragging her close as though he wants to crawl beneath her skin to keep the rest of the world at bay from behind the bars of her ribcage.

Sometimes, Jonathan is himself: telling her stories without censoring out the parts that other men do, expression alight with glee, fidgeting with his clothes with tics that he has brought back with him the way other husbands bring home souvenirs. He kisses her and peels apart her underclothes and murmurs _I missed you_ into her throat and her breasts and her stomach and her thighs and every last part of her until she is humming with it, skin alive with the glitter of his affection. He watches her in her sleep in a way that is different to the way that he watched before, and when she wakes in the night and finds him dreaming his eyes rove behind the lids, his face creases, restless and half-scared, returning again and again to a place that she cannot drag him back from. 

“You didn’t have to take on the French to impress me, you know,” Arabella tells him one evening, watching him stretch out, cat-like, on an ottoman; part her Jonathan, part this stranger who has come here to fill the space he left behind.

“What else to Englishmen do to impress pretty girls?” he responds, his easy charm splintering off him, clumsy and sweet and yet refined from their London seasons. She supposes that neither of them are quite the people they were to begin with; and not just because they both wear company manners and refinement more comfortably than they did to begin with, not just because the newspapers casually fill with tales of them.

Sometimes, Arabella misses when Jonathan was special only to _her_.

Jonathan awakes in the dead of night howling without sound; the grandfather clock downstairs has chimed and it sounds nothing like the shrieking of musket and cannonballs, but nonetheless it clicks something in Jonathan’s mind sometimes. He finally admitted this to her, and Arabella offered to have the clock removed; it belonged to a distant relative, she thinks, and she has never really liked it, but Jonathan shook his head, brisk and cheerful, and announced that he’d soon be past this with a jocularity that rang false. 

Arabella sits up in their bed and watches Jonathan clawing at his chest, not yet awake, convinced that his breastbone has been sheared through by artillery. It’s all a dream, a memory that may have happened to someone else but not to him, but he isn’t yet awake enough to remember that. And the force of it, of his _terror_ , of perhaps his magic, means that for a long moment, Arabella sees it too: the blood sticky on his palms, his organs spilling over his nightshirt, bones white in the darkness of the room, and for a moment she wants to scramble away from the wounds sloughing over the blankets. And then she shakes her head and blinks and remembers that he came home, solid and whole and quieter, perhaps, but still hers.

She gathers him close to her, pulls his hands away from the wounds, and kisses his trembling fingertips until he recalls where he is, what has happened, and that he is safe for now. Arabella feels when he breaks, his whole body going heavy and lax against her, the horrified sobs of his breathing smoothing out into something _exhausted_ instead.

“I’m sorry,” he says at last.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Arabella responds, the words coming out sharper than she anticipated, but at least Jonathan seems to understand because he says nothing else, just remains curled into her, face pressed into her neck, eyelashes peeling wet.

In the daylight, it’s possible to imagine that the night was a bad dream they shared or perhaps just invented in their own separate war-torn minds; Arabella sips her tea and talks about new curtains the way that wives are supposed to, watching the cracks close and open in Jonathan’s vague smile. He’s not listening to her; he’s not meant to be. She talks about domesticity and it’s a warm steady hum of noise for him to tether himself to and then drift off from, toying with a piece of toast and his morning features. He looks exhausted, but less exhausted than he used to be, and his hair is as curled and unruly as always. Arabella missed that part of him perhaps the most; her husband, her magician, her brave soldier who carried home praise and medals and notoriety and all that he had seen and done packed like the ice slivers in his heart.

Jonathan makes a vague agreeing sound to something Arabella says about maroon for the second sitting room, and reaches for the newspaper. She waits until he’s finished reading the front and turned the page before she lets herself smile, relief making her hands shiver just momentarily as she reaches toward the marmalade.


End file.
